Why is the instructor telling us to breathe? Has someone forgotten to breathe?

For about 30 years now I have been thinking about going to yoga. I have given it 30 years thought because I don’t like to rush into things. Okay that’s not true – I just don’t like to rush into yoga. Actually I was a little afraid of it. I thought it would be boring and that I would either fall asleep or walk out because I have the attention span of a tiny little gnat with attention deficit disorder.

But I had to try it, I don’t have another 30 years to think about it. This point was made clear to me when I recently subscribed to Lena Dunham’s new newsletter Lenny and read an article entitled “Why You Should Start Exercising in Your 20’s”.  Trace Anderson, who wrote the article  even said “waiting to exercise later in life, when our metabolism slows down and being fit requires more work, is no longer an option”. Clearly I am in the wrong demographic for this newsletter but still… I  can’t say it didn’t spur me on.

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Is it cheating if you’re not actually reading the book?

My hypochondria started when I was young and I blame the radio. And those awesome little cardboard dolls came with outfits made out of paper that you had to cut out with great precision and fold the tabs over the doll to dress her.

paper doll

You see when I was a little girl and I got sick my mother would buy me one of these doll/clothes combos and leave me to lie in bed with the radio next to me. It’s not that we were anti-technology or that I was too ill to go to the lounge to watch telly, it’s just that TV hadn’t yet made it’s way to South Africa when I was a child. Shocking, I know but it developed in me a mighty fine appreciation of the radio.
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I’m counting every step I take (and it is as boring as it sounds)

For a person who hates numbers as much as I do I am a bit obsessed with them. You could say I have a bit of an obsession with counting while at the same time harbouring a deep and genuine hatred for any form of mathematics or sentences containing numbers. It’s a constant battle in my head between calming myself with sequences and loathing the thought of numbers swilling about in my head.

And, even though some would try to teach me not to rely on the repetition of words between one and one hundred, the listing of numbers in chronological order brings me a great sense of comfort. It’s my “coping mechanism”, my crutch – it’s also my fixation and possibly one of the only things that really motivates me to exercise.

The pursuit of sequences and the attention to changing numbers and reaching predetermined goals used to ensure that my main form of exercise was the treadmill. I can stay on the treadmill for hours 40 minutes reaching all sorts of makeshift goals – one more km (counted down in metres) or 10 more minutes (counted down in one minute increments of course). I can run for another two minutes and then walk for three – every single step measured against an achievable number. It’s kept me treadmill fit for years.

But now, thanks to my newest obsession with fitness trackers, I am finally being released from my one-meter space at the gym and I am unleashing my counting and goal setting all over the place.

I bought myself a FitBit after much research and agonising and borrowing of my son’s Nike Fuel Band. At first I was only interested in counting my steps. It was all about getting to 10 000 steps in a day. But that turned out to be a bit too simple – the early morning walk with Fluffy Pencil takes care of at least 5 000 steps so by 7am I am half way there. It’s been upped to 15 000. 20 000 on a day that I go back to the treadmill.

But I quickly learned there is so much that a middle-aged hypochondriac with a FitBit can obsess over. When my husband asks me how I slept the night before I can bring up a graph to show him in detail. I understand that this can seem boring but I have very restless nights so my graphs are quite lovely to look at – I just have to convince anyone other than myself of that fact.

I can track my heart rate at any time – and I do. I have discovered that the doctor was right, my heart does beat a little fast – cue a million other things to worry about which in turn will cause my heart to beat faster, but niftily I can watch that rise.

I can map the route that I walk to bore people with at a later stage, see how many steps that walk was, what my heart was doing during all that step taking and how many calories I burned. In fact I can see how many calories I have burned over a day and I can compare that to how many I have eaten – the difference is not currently pointing to any weight loss. Damn.

I can see how many kilometres I’ve walked in a day, how many flights of stairs I’ve climbed and I can even track how much water I drink. Unfortunately I haven’t worked out how to set the alarm and I find it a bit irritating as a watch, but who needs time when you can track your heart beats per minute over a period of seven days?
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Since I got this nifty device I have parked further from my destination, I have walked to places I would normally drive to and I have studied my sleep in the way that only a person who actually understands sleep cycles would normally do.

It would be all good except for one thing – I have become a total bore.

Today over breakfast I found myself telling someone what my heart rate was, how many hours I slept last night and how many steps I had taken this morning. Worse than that was when I actually showed her in graph form. I would have seen her eyes glaze over but I was to busy looking at how many calories I had burned.

Do you wear a fitness tracker? How many steps do you do in a day?

PS Just reread this post and it reads like it was sponsored by FitBit – it’s not but if they want to pay me I will happily put the data into a nifty graph on my dashboard.

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